This article attempts to describe students’ process of learning physics using the notion
of experiencing variation as the basic mechanism for learning, and thus explores what
variation, with respect to a particular object of learning, that students experience in
their process of constituting understanding. Theoretically, the analysis relies on
analytic tools from the phenomenographic research tradition, and the recent group of
studies colloquially known as the variation theory of learning, having the notion of
experiencing variation as a key for learning at its core. Empirically, the study relies on
video and audio recordings of seven pairs of students interacting in a computersimulation
learning environment featuring Bohr’s model of the atom. The data was
analysed on a micro-level for the emergence of student-recognised variation, depicted
in terms of ‘threads of learning’. This was done by linking variation around aspects of
the object of learning present in the situation and attended to by the students to new
ways of seeing – characterised as an expanding anatomy of awareness, and hence as
learning.
The students’ threads of learning are characterised in terms of two stages of learning
progress: (1) discerning variation, and (2) constituting meaning from this experience
of variation (experienced as holistically relevant in the students’ conceptual domain
of physics and the Bohr model). Two groups of threads of learning were identified:
one where the variation experienced by students was within an aspect of the object of
learning, and one where variation was across several aspects.... more